Preaching's Preacher's Guide to the Best Bible Reference for 2014 (Pauline Studies)
Ever since E. P. Sanders published
Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977, students of Paul have been probing, weighing and debating the similarities and dissimilarities between the understandings of salvation in Judaism and in Paul. Do they really share a common notion of divine and human agency? Or do they differ at a deep level? And if so, how? Broadly speaking, the answers have lined up on either side of the old perspective and new perspective divide. But can we move beyond this impasse?Preston Sprinkle reviews the state of the question and then tackles the problem. Buried in the Old Testament's Deuteronomic and prophetic perspectives on divine and human agency, he finds a key that starts to turn the rusted lock on Paul's critique of Judaism. Here is a proposal that offers a new line of investigation and thinking about a crucial issue in Pauline theology.
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The phrase “Paul and Judaism” is an odd one, since Paul himself was a Jew. He was a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” a descendant “from the tribe of Benjamin” and a member of the true “Israel of God.”[6] But according to his own testimony, he was snatched from his aggressive pursuit of Judaism by the Messiah himself and was enlisted to proclaim a message quite different from anything in Judaism at the time.[7] Although Paul spoke as a Jew who belonged to the covenant people of God, he also believed that the Christian movement stood in opposition to at least some forms of Judaism.[8] Paul was a Jew, yet he was an “idiosyncratic Jew” who “engaged in critical dialogue with other Jews about a common heritage and identity.”[9] As such, the phrase “Paul and Judaism” is fitting.
What this study will “revisit” is the soteriology of Paul and Judaism. Such a goal is, of course, unattainable—Judaism in the first century was much too diverse, and the idea of soteriology is far too anachronistic. So we will spend this chapter trimming our goal down to a manageable size, which will include a rather annotated definition of soteriology. But before we do that, we will summarize the last few decades of scholarship on this topic.
E. P. Sanders and the New Perspective on Paul
In 1977, E. P. Sanders published his groundbreaking book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism,[10] which has significantly altered the way scholars and students of the New Testament understand Paul and early Judaism. Previous to Sanders, most scholars understood first-century Judaism to be a legalistic religion governed by a system of merit and devoid of grace.[11] Sanders challenged this assumption by showing that the ancient Jewish documents themselves portray a religion that does not fit the dominant consensus. The Jewish writings leave little trace of a legalistic religion; rather, they hold grace and works in a healthy—one may say biblical—relationship. To describe this relationship, Sanders coined the phrase “covenantal nomism,” which he defines as “the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.”[12] In other words, obedience to the law was not a means of earning God’s grace but was the necessary covenant response to God’s prior grace. So if Judaism was a religion based on grace, what did Paul find wrong with it? Sanders concluded in a now-famous dictum that Paul’s problem with Judaism was simply that it was not Christianity.[13]
Paul and Palestinian Judaism created a wake of variegated responses. Some were critical of his method yet agreed with his overall correction of previous caricatures of early Judaism. Others believed that his understanding of Judaism was spot-on, while his view of Paul was less convincing. Still others reacted against his view of both Paul and Judaism, maintaining a more or less “Old Perspective” on the two.[14] The one who picked up the mantle with the most vigor is James D. G. Dunn, who in a flurry of publications moved the discussion to a whole new level.[15] It all started with his 1982 Manson lecture, “The New Perspective on Paul,” which was published a year later.[16] The title of this essay gave his new view on Paul and Judaism its well-known moniker—so well-known that the abbreviation NPP (New Perspective on Paul) is now intelligible to many pastors, students of the New Testament and quite a number of biblio-bloggers, regardless of whether they have actually read anything by James Dunn. In agreement with Sanders, Dunn argues that Paul’s problem with Judaism was its ethnocentrism, not its supposed legalism. According to Dunn, Paul (especially in Romans, Galatians and Philippians) was not arguing for salvation by grace alone against works-righteousness; rather, he was arguing for Gentile inclusion against Jewish ethnocentrism. Jews of Paul’s day believed that a Gentile must first become a proselyte in order to become a member of the covenant. Paul argued against this, promoting the dangerous notion that the Gentiles need not take on the Jewish identity markers, such as circumcision, Sabbath keeping and food laws, in order to be genuine Christ-followers and covenant members. This is why Paul counters “works of the law” with “faith in Christ” (e.g., Rom 3:28; Gal 2:16). For Dunn, the phrase “works of the law” is shorthand not for legalism but for the “characteristically and distinctively Jewish practices (‘identity marker[s]’)”[17] that exclude Gentiles as Gentiles from becoming covenant members, while “faith in Christ” is “the only means for anyone, everyone, to receive God’s righteousness.”[18]
James Dunn is not the only one who has reread Paul in light of Sanders’s portrayal of early Judaism. In fact, though Dunn coined the term New Perspective, it could be argued that N. T. Wright birthed it in his 1977 Tyndale lecture, published the following year, when he sought to “contribute” to the debate between Krister Stendahl and Ernst Käsemann “by offering a new way of looking at Paul which provides . . . a new perspective on other related Pauline problems.”[19] Wright proceeded to unpack this new perspective by showing that Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness,[20] and that the doctrine of justification was not the core of Paul’s thought but was a polemical doctrine aimed at Jewish national pride.[21] Wright’s lecture was a brilliant contribution to the discussion, especially since he had not yet completed his doctoral thesis.[22] Since then, he has gone on to write several influential books and articles that have proven to be foundational for the New Perspective, even though years later Wright would label his approach a “fresh,” rather than “new,” perspective on Paul.[23] Wright differs from Sanders and Dunn on several important facets of Paul’s theology,[24] but all three believe that Judaism was not legalistic. God’s grace was fundamental for salvation, and obedience to the law was a response to prior grace—a soteriological structure not wholly different from Paul’s. All three, therefore, agree on one important feature that underlines the discussion: continuity.
Continuity and Discontinuity Between Paul and Early Judaism
Continuity can be an ambiguous term. Most theological students are familiar with its use in discussions related to the Old and New Testaments. For instance, scholars often talk about continuity in terms of Israel and the church, or the old covenant and the new. But the term has been applied to the Paul and Judaism debate, and to my mind, this is really the crux of the issue. How much continuity is there between the nature of salvation in Paul and in Judaism? This is a much more concrete way of framing the discussion, rather than getting caught up on Old and New Perspectives on Paul.[25] Since there is so much diversity among scholars who would generally adhere to what we call an Old or New Perspective on Paul, we should be very cautious in using these general labels. Instead of using the terms “Old” and “New” to refer to one’s perspective on Paul, I will use the terms “continuity” and “discontinuity” as a heuristic means of capturing the way scholars understand Paul’s soteriology in relation to Judaism’s. (We will get to the equally problematic term “soteriology” below.) Those who see more continuity argue that the relationship between divine and human agency in salvation is functionally the same in both Judaism and Paul, despite some obvious differences (the centrality of Jesus Christ, a law-free gospel, etc.). In both cases, God establishes the covenant relationship by grace, and the human agent responds in faith to this gracious offer. Obedience then flows from this covenant relationship; obedience is not a means of earning God’s grace, but is a response to God’s prior grace. For those who see more discontinuity, the reverse is true: in salvation, God responds to prior human action, a formulation seen in Judaism but not in Paul. Therefore, despite some conceptual similarities, Paul and Judaism promote two different structures of salvation.
Apart from the writings of Dunn and Wright, another thorough and rather convincing study that defends continuity is the published doctoral dissertation of Kent Yinger, entitled Paul, Judaism, and Judgment According to Deeds.[26] Yinger agrees with Sanders that early Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness and that entrance into the covenant was by grace alone. One’s obedience to the covenant stipulations was a response to God’s prior grace, and it maintained one’s status as a covenant member. Yinger traces the motif of “judgment according to deeds” through a broad sampling of Second Temple texts and argues that the deeds of the righteous “confirm or reveal one’s fundamental loyalty to God,”[27] but they do not make one righteous before God. In turning to Paul, Yinger finds the relationship between grace and obedience largely the same as what we find in Judaism: obedience is not a condition for entry into the covenant, but a condition for maintaining one’s status.[28] Yinger, therefore, sees much continuity between the soteriological frameworks of Paul and Second Temple Judaism.[29] Bruce Longenecker emphasizes this same point in an article that criticizes those who stress discontinuity, arguing that these scholars have only “highlighted the ‘worst’ features (from a Pauline perspective) of Jewish texts and . . . have marginalised those that, even from a Pauline perspective, are admirable.”[30] Like Yinger, Longenecker believes that a more sensitive reading of Jewish texts would show that Paul’s soteriology was just as gracious as Judaism’s. “[B]oth Pauline and Jewish texts envisage God as empowering his people to live acceptably before him.”[31]
Against this view, there are those who see more discontinuity between Paul and early Judaism. Not only are there differences with regard to the content of faith (the centrality of Jesus, a law-free gospel, etc.), but also with regard to the actual shape of the soteriological structure. Simon Gathercole, for instance, engages the same general topic as Yinger does but concludes that while there may be “continuity as to obedience being a criterion for final judgment,” there is “discontinuity as to the character of the obedience.”[32] For Paul, divine empowerment through the spirit generates the obedience necessary for the final day, and this is not paralleled in early Judaism. Likewise, Francis Watson, John Barclay, Stephen Westerholm and others have argued for discontinuity between Pauline and Jewish soteriology, due to differences in their anthropology, their hermeneutics or their understanding of grace.[33] Most scholars who stress discontinuity see more of an emphasis in Judaism on the human agent in salvation, with Paul highlighting divine agency.[34]
This whole discussion may sound dangerously anachronistic. Are we not simply reading our modern theological debates between Calvinism and Arminianism (or Protestantism and Catholicism) back into these ancient texts? Certainly there can be an element of this,[35] but we need to keep in mind that similar debates were alive and well in the first century. In fact, when Josephus describes the various “philosophies,” or sects, of Judaism, he defines them in terms of what they believed about predestination and free will.[36] And long before Arminius reacted against Calvin’s doctrine, an ancient Jew named Jesus Ben Sirach argued passionately for a free-will theology that would delight a modern Arminian.[37] The opposite is true for the author of 4 Ezra, who at around A.D. 100 espoused what in many ways sounds like a proto-Augustinian view of salvation. Paul seems to engage the same questions in the ninth chapter of his letter to the Romans. All that to say, by framing the discussion in terms of divine and human agency, we are not squeezing modern views into texts that were not asking these questions; rather, we are recognizing and analyzing the concerns that were in the air of the first-century Jewish world and have remained significant ever since.
Such questions concerning divine and human agency are at the forefront of recent discussions of Paul and Judaism. Significant works include Francis Watson’s Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (2004), Gathercole and Barclay’s edited Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment (2006), the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Kyle Wells, “Grace, Obedience, and the Hermeneutics of Agency” (2009),[38] and Jason Maston’s recent Divine and Human Agency in Second Temple Judaism and in Paul (2010)[39]—all of which will be dialogue partners throughout this book. These works are only a sampling, however, of the recent publications that explore the relationship between divine and human agency in terms of continuity and discontinuity. Despite these fine studies, the discussion is in no way closed. More work is needed, different methods are required, and new light ought to be shed on these old issues. This book is an attempt to contribute to the discussion regarding continuity and discontinuity in the soteriological structures of Paul and Judaism; or more precisely, Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls (see below).[40] And the word “contribute” is important. The issues are too complicated, and this book is far too limited in scope, to assume that it could resolve the debate, nor is it intended to d...
